I feel like nobody gave you a clear explanation, so here is a ELI5 explanation:

An ETF is like a company that doesn't do anything other than owning something. You can own shares in an ETF just like any company. The value of the ETF and its shares are determined only by the value of the stuff that it owns because it doesn't do anything else. If the value of the stuff goes up, the values of the ETF and its shares go up. If the value of the stuff goes down, the values of the ETF and its shares go down.

In this case, a Bitcoin ETF owns bitcoins. Suppose the ETF owns 1000 BTC and the ETF issued 1 million shares. If the price of 1 BTC is $30,000, then the value of the ETF is 1000 x $30,000, or $30,000,000. Each share is worth ¹/_1,000,000 of that, or $30. If the price of a bitcoin drops to $25,000, then the value of the ETF drops to 1000 x $25,000, or $25,000,000. Each share is now worth ¹/_1,000,000 of that, or $25.

There is actually more going in an ETF, but those are the basics.

It is called a "spot" ETF because the ETF's value tracks Bitcoin's "spot" price. Some may also call it a "physical" ETF because it owns the actual bitcoins instead of contracts, but that is a little weird because bitcoins are not physical. There are also Bitcoin "futures" ETFs and these own futures contracts.

People often conflate investing in a token with investing in a project. They are two different things.

1. Is the token an essential component of the project? In other words, is the project viable with an existing token or without any token? For example, a taxi/ride-sharing app using a proprietary token has no real need for the token.

2. Is it possible to determine a value of the token based on its utility? For, example, the value of a governance token is tied directly to the value of being able to vote. How is that value determined? Also note that the value of a governance token is not necessarily related to the success of a project.

I am writing Bitcoin-related software in C/C++ and I need to select a cryptography library that supports the usual stuff -- ECDSA, ECC math, SHA2, RIPEMD, PBKDF2, HMAC, and a secure RNG. Any suggestions?

I just assumed that I would be using OpenSSL, but I have discovered that with OpenSSL 3, all of the "low-level" functionality has been deprecated, and that is exactly what I was intending to use. Perhaps, I could use the "high-level" features, but I don't know how or if they even do what I need. Also, I can't find any examples of anyone using these features anywhere, which is weird.

Perhaps sticking with a legacy version of OpenSSL is a good solution.

A friend suggested WolfSSL. It does what I need but it has some drawbacks -- it is a pain to integrate and 75% of the API is undocumented.

What are you using?

That doesn't make sense because the miner would be paying the fees that they earn. Why would a miner to fill a block with their own transactions that effectively earn them nothing when they can include transactions that earn something?

If a miner doesn't want to include transactions with low fees, then they just don't include them. Its not clear why a miner would do that because the miner would be giving up money for no benefit.

FYI, researchers have not been able to replicate the lk-99 results, meaning that it is likely that it was a mistake.

As units of 100 satoshis are not used anywhere, I don't think it will catch on. But if it does, feel free to take credit.

I wonder if Paypal's stablecoin is the motivation for this announcement today: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/08/08/fed-starts-new-program-to-oversee-crypto-activity-in-us-banks/

Assuming that the 12-character string is generated randomly and the range for each character is [0-9][a-z][A-Z], Then, the number of possible keys is 62¹², or approximately 2^71.5, so you have only 71.5 bits of entropy.

In my non-expert opinion, it is not safe for a private key.

Perhaps you could do it with Bitcoin Core. On the sending wallet's node, create a raw transaction with a fee of 0 using createrawtransaction and signrawtransactionwithkey. Enter the transaction on both the sending and receiving wallet nodes using sendrawtransaction so that they both see it. I assume the transaction will be added to their mempools because they are valid, but will not be relayed because the fee is too low.

I have never tried it, so I don't know if it will work.

1. The difficulty is determined by the protocol and not the miners. It is not possible for miners to maintain a low difficulty unless they all agree to limit their hash rates.
2. As pointed out, the "longest" chain is the one with the highest cumulative difficulty, and not the one with the most blocks. However, the two are normally equivalent except when there is a chain split.

Here is the ELI5 explanation: When a new block is received, a miner must spend time processing it and selecting a new set of transactions for the next block. The miner wastes time if it does nothing while setting up the new block, so the miner instead immediately starts on an empty block and switches to a full block when it is set up. Occasionally, the miner solves the empty block.

Also, note that block timestamps aren't required to be accurate so the 1 minute difference was probably not really 1 minute.

Why don't you just create your own wallets to crack?

Before anyone gets too confused by this hair-splitting of the difference between miners and nodes, let me explain.

The function of a node is to receive transactions and blocks, validate them, and then propagate the valid transactions and blocks to other nodes. A node keeps a copy of the block chain and a list of transactions that are waiting to be added to it. The pending transactions are stored in a database called the mempool.

Mining is the process of constructing blocks to add to the block chain. Hashing is a part of that process.

Originally, mining was part of the node's functionality and miners and nodes were basically the same thing. However, the term "miner" has become ambiguous with the advent of mining pools and the separation of node software from mining software.

In a mining pool, the components of the mining process are split between the pool and the members. The pool constructs blocks and broadcasts the found blocks, and the members hash the block headers. Members of mining pools call themselves miners even though all they do is the hashing. But, since that is the majority of the effort of constructing a block, perhaps the label is justified.

Note that with the Stratum V2 and BetterHash mining protocols, the distinction between the roles of a pool and its members is now much fuzzier.

Anyway, that is why there is ambiguity about what exactly is done by a miner.

There is no need to check the entire history. The node maintains a list of confirmed transactions that have not yet been spent (the UTXO set) and checks that the inputs of new transactions are in that list.

Once a transaction is confirmed, its inputs are removed from the list because they are now spent and can never be spent again, and its outputs are added to the list.

It's ironic that people make the same argument against Bitcoin.

What is missing is the standardization of the code inscription. Your description implies some form of Javascript, but the standard needs to be very specific about the execution environment in order to guarantee the correctness of the generated results.

The issue is not the term you are using, it is what you are measuring. When you measure randomness, you are measuring the process and not the result itself. So, the question should be "how random is the process that generated this string of bits?" and not "how random is this string of bits?" The reason is simply that in a purely random process, every result is equally likely and thus equally hard to guess.

The problem of results with identifiable patterns is not that they aren't random results, it is that they are potentially results from a non-random process, and it is much more effective to attack non-random processes. However, the likelihood of generating such results using a random process is low enough that it is not a problem. For example, a password that happens to be one of the 1 million variations of the most commonly used 8-character passwords would be trivial to guess, but the odds of a random 8-character password using letters and numbers being one of those is 1 in 2 billion.

OTOH, there are statistical methods of evaluating the randomness of a process using the results. One example is the Chi-squared test. The accuracies of these tests depend on the amount of data and a single seed is not enough to be useful.

Value doesn't require utility. There are many things that have no real utility but still have value. What is the utility of the Mona Lisa?

It's silly to argue that something has no value simply because it has no value to you.

It seems to me that you don't like ordinals and inscriptions because they don't fit your belief of what Bitcoin should be. Why not just say that instead of making these silly arguments about what should or should not have value.

If these are the reasons for a vanity address, then a person with a vanity address wants the opposite of privacy.


In my view, the question is meaningless. It is the generation of energy that has an environmental impact, and not the usage.

I don't think there really is a good way to determine the value something with such an arbitrary rarity. Ultimately, all satoshis are unique using ordinals, so they are all equally rare.

In the end, I don't think satoshis enumerated using Ordinals will hold any collectible value.

But, I am confused. You are using the perceived rarity of the satoshis to value them, so what do images associated with them have to do with it?